At dinner, he was seated between a Lady Greensword, who was forthright and incorrect about nearly everything, and a Miss Belmont who was so shy and nervous she barely ate anything and spoke only in an inaudible whisper.

  One of the young bucks at the table started droning on about his travels, and Santiago realised half the table was enraptured. Mostly the female half. What had Tiffany said, that first night, that ladies didn’t travel?

  Apart from Tiffany’s mother, who from all he could gather had gone abroad shortly after her child was born, and never returned. And for this, she had been vilified. Nobody spoke of her. Barely a line in the Peerage.

  There were not even any portraits. He had asked Cornforth, who had simply looked awkward and mumbled something about her not having been here long enough.

  He wondered if Tiffany even knew what she looked like.

  ‘Truly,’ one of the Greensword nephews was droning on. ‘The most spectacular sight. The awe of the ancient world.’

  ‘It is so exciting to hear of your travels, my dear,’ said Lady Greensword indulgently. To Santiago, she said, ‘Jeremy has travelled quite extensively. Venice, Naples, Rome⁠—’

  ‘So, Italy?’ said Santiago.

  ‘—Florence … why … yes, but also… Dear, did you not travel to … er, Flanders, was it?’

  The nephew in question looked over at her. ‘What? Oh. Yes. Ghent, Bruges. Lovely, lovely. But nothing compares to Italy. I have never been somewhere so … remote. So … so very different from everything we have here.’

  Santiago thought about the mist over the Yangtze river, the gleaming domes of the Taj Mahal, the man-eating lizards of the South Pacific. ‘What makes it so very different?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh!’ Clearly delighted to have an audience, and quite neglecting the lady to his left, Jeremy launched into an account of the food—so spicy!—and the architecture—so ancient!—and the culture—so very, very foreign!

  Eventually, after a monologue explaining how he overcame seasickness in the Venice Lagoon, he slowed enough for his brother to get a word in edgeways.

  ‘We did think of visiting Spain, of course, but it was so frightfully dangerous at the time. We were risking enough, travelling as we did.’

  Around the table, murmurs went up about their bravery in having travelled whilst Bonaparte was still at large.

  ‘But of course, you could tell us about Spain, Your Grace,’ said Lady Greensword, and Santiago really really wished Tiffany was here so he could see her face at that comment.

  ‘I am afraid I have not had the privilege of travelling there,’ he said.

  ‘But—’ she said, and began to go a little pink. ‘But you are Spa— Are you not Spa⁠—?’

  ‘I was born in Chile, my lady,’ said Santiago patiently. ‘Which is currently under Spanish rule, although the situation may have changed lately. I have not been there for many years.’ Not since they were chased away by his father’s debtors, and gone to Argentina, then Peru, then Brazil…

  ‘Oh. So it’s like Spain, then?’

  He shrugged and swirled his wine in its glass. ‘I have no idea. People speak Spanish, yes. But they also speak Mapuche and other local languages.’

  ‘Do you speak … um, that?’ asked the Belmont sister sitting opposite him.

  ‘A little. My mother was fluent.’

  ‘I had heard she was a Mayan princess!’ broke in a man further down the table.

  ‘No, they are from Mexico. I did travel there, but⁠—’

  ‘What’s the other one? The one with all the gold?’

  ‘Ah, you mean the Aztecs. Actually, she is descended from el Conde de Moctezuma de Tultengo, who is said to be a descendant of Moctezuma—the great ruler of the Aztec Empire,’ he added, when they all looked at him blankly.

  ‘So she’s an Aztec princess!’ breathed one of the Belmont sisters.

  ‘If you like,’ he said hopelessly. They might as well enjoy their fantasies.

  ‘Where is she now? Is she coming to England?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Santiago. ‘She entered a convent when I was eight.’

  That silenced the chatter. Sensing some awkward questions about how and when his mother had converted to Anglicanism and then back to Catholicism again to enter the convent, he changed the subject. ‘At which time I began travelling more extensively. I spent many years travelling the Pacific.’

  ‘The Pacific?’

  That turned out to be a mistake. He spent the rest of dinner regaling them with tales of his travels, while the Greensword nephews and their aunt became increasingly sullen. The stories were cleaned up, of course. Fewer cholera-ridden slums and druglords with machetes, and more beautiful islands and exotic foods.

  He told the stories as if he was telling them to Tiffany, but most of his jokes fell flat.

  After dinner, when the table was cleared and the ladies excused themselves, he knew he was supposed to stay for cigars and port with the gentlemen. But he noticed the glance that went between Lord and Lady Cornforth as she left the room, and he knew something was up.

  Tiffany didn’t have a headache. Tiffany was being confined to her room for some other reason, and he didn’t think it had anything to do with her health.

  His hand absently patted his pocket, where he slightly fancied her necklace was still warm from her skin.

  He excused himself after knocking back one small, quick glass of port. The cigars on offer were flavourless things, so he left his in the ashtray and made vague mentions of having left something in his room.

  Halfway up the grand staircase he heard voices. Voices that were somehow raised and hushed all at the same time. Lady Cornforth, berating someone.

  ‘Well, if she’s not going to even open the door then she can go to bed with no supper.’ Someone else murmured, another female voice. ‘No, Morris. You will not leave it outside the door. And you will tell the kitchen not to send anything up, and if she ventures down, to give her nothing. Do you understand me? If she is going to behave like a child, then she can be treated like one. You will leave her until the morning.’

  Footsteps hurried down towards him and he ran downstairs too, grateful for once that his evening slippers were thin-soled and didn’t clomp about like a pair of boots would. He ducked around the side of the staircase, and waited until Lady Cornforth had hurried past in the direction of the drawing room.

  Well, that was pretty unequivocal. He hurried up the stairs and caught a maid heading towards the other end of the corridor, where presumably the servants’ stair was. She looked vaguely familiar, probably from the time he’d carried Tiffany home.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said softly, and she turned to bob a curtsey and nearly dropped her tray.

  ‘Your Grace!’

  ‘Yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘You are Lady Tiffany’s maid, yes? Morris?’ When she nodded, he continued, ‘Is she unwell?’

  ‘Er,’ said Morris, who was clearly a terrible liar. ‘Yes?’

  ‘That is very sad to hear. Will she come down this evening?’

  ‘I … er, I don’t think so, Your Grace.’

  ‘Oh dear. Perhaps you should leave that for her, in case she is hungry later?’

  Morris looked terrified. She had just been told one thing by her uncompromising mistress, and now here he was telling her another.

  ‘Er…’

  ‘Look.’ He smiled at her, the smile that had worked on everyone but the pirate queen of the South China Seas, and said, ‘Perhaps I could speak with her? It would lay my mind at rest. I have travelled all this way to see Lady Tiffany…’ he said, and let the implication hang there.

  What are you doing? he screamed at himself. Implying that you’ve come all this way to … ask for her hand? Once Morris gets that into her head, she’ll tell all the other servants and then everyone will know!

  But he really did want to speak with her. And he had no way of knowing which was her chamber.

  ‘If you accompany me then there can be no impropriety,’ he added, and Morris looked very torn.

  He kept smiling.

  ‘Well, I suppose…’ she said, and he smiled wider.

  She led him towards what he thought was the side of the house, where the windows probably looked out onto the stables, and indicated a door quite firmly closed.

  The necklace in his pocket was getting warmer. He wasn’t imagining it.

  ‘She has locked it,’ Morris whispered.

  Santiago nodded and tapped at it gently. ‘Lady Tiffany?’ He hesitated, then for the benefit of the maid, added an endearment. ‘Mi amor, are you all right?’

  No answer.

  ‘Tiffany? Can you hear me?’

  ‘Perhaps she’s asleep, sir,’ said Morris, and he nodded.

  ‘Thank you, Morris. I will perhaps see her tomorrow.’

  He watched her go, and then he knocked harder on the door, knelt down and put his lips to the keyhole. ‘Tiffany, open the door right now, before I break it down. You know I am capable.’

  Nothing. She wasn’t in there, and probably hadn’t been for hours. Overlooked the stables, eh? Well, then.

  It didn’t take him long to escape the house by means of the servants’ stair—startling a few footmen cadging a smoke as he did—and make his way around to the side of the house. The service wing was here, abutting the main house and shielded from the front and back lawns by a high hedge. This time of night, it blazed with light and activity as the servants cleared up after dinner, but everyone was inside, away from the rain.

  If anyone saw or heard him scale the walls and climb over the roofs they didn’t challenge him. This sort of thing probably happened all the time at house parties anyway. He’d noticed at least one couple at dinner eyeing each other up—and they were both married to other people.

  Yes—there was an open window, approximately the distance from the front of the house he’d calculated. The room within was dark, but the pendant in his pocket was warm. He carefully crept across the slick, wet kitchen roof to the ledge beneath Tiffany’s window, and took a deep breath.

  ‘Tiffany?’

  No response. She almost certainly wasn’t in there. But just in case⁠—

  ‘Tiffany, it’s me. Santiago. Are you all right? Answer me.’

  Nothing.

  ‘I’m going to come in now,’ he warned, and raised his head to look inside the room.

  There was a shape in the bed. He called again, but it didn’t move, and when he finally swung into the room and crept closer, he saw that it was a bundle of clothes shoved into the approximate shape of a person under the covers.

  He sighed. She had run away—but where? Where could she go from here? She had to know it wasn’t safe for her to be on her own at night, even if this was the estate she’d grown up on and she knew it and the village nearby like the back of her hand…

  He crossed to the dressing table, where a candle stood half burnt, and lit it to see better by. The room was neat, with an ugly mauve dress hung up as if to be changed into for dinner. But the dressing table itself was what intrigued him.

  Written on a piece of paper was a name. Mr Cotton, husband of Amy Cotton née Proudbody, of Ivy Cottage, Churlish Green. That was the village he’d ridden through on his way here. Beside it was a flower, a weed really, already withered and half dead. And beside that a single earring, a pale stone he couldn’t identify in the gloom. When he brought the candle closer to them, it flared.

  It flared green.

  A spell. She had done some kind of spell on this Mr Cotton, and now… What, she had gone to find him? Why? Who was he?

  The necklace in his pocket was warmer than before. He fished it out, afraid it might burn him, and stared at it. It was made of shell, a white cameo of an unknown woman on a pale blue background, strung from a green ribbon, and it was very faintly glowing.

  Santiago had seen many strange things in his life, but a green candle and a glowing necklace were stranger than the rest put together.

  ‘Where are you?’ he whispered, and the cameo woman turned her head slightly to the left. He nearly dropped it. ‘Tiffany?’

  He let the pendant drop to the full length of its ribbon, and it strained, ever so slightly, towards the far wall of the room. Towards the back of the house. Towards the village.

  ‘Mierda,’ he muttered.

  CHAPTER 13

  The rough music, the skimmington ride. Pots and pans and burning in effigy. Tiffany wasn’t sure she could quite manage dragging anyone through the street, but she could very well do the rest.

  She was righteous in her anger as she marched towards the village, which was just as well as she hadn’t realised quite how dark it would be, or how frightened she would be in the hollow lane. She daren’t conjure a witch light in case someone should see it, and she wasn’t completely sure she could put it out again. She had put on her stoutest boots and plainest dress, and a dark cloak covered her satchel of supplies, but the rain had soaked her in minutes, and it only seemed to be getting harder.

  Aunt Esme had said a finding spell worked best with a crystal or semi-precious stone of some kind. She had used a topaz earring, which now glowed warmly in her palm. There was a weed she had pulled from Mrs Cotton’s garden as she passed by earlier. His name she didn’t know, but she had described him as accurately as possible when she did the ritual. And now it had led her here, to the tavern, which was full of light and noise and merriment.

  She had filched a box of chalks from the nursery, and used it to draw on the stones of the wall by the brook what she had planned after Elinor shut her in her room. A row of pots and pans, held together by string. A string she tied to the gatepost of Ivy Cottage—which stood dark and forlorn, a baby crying within.

  Next she drew fearsome shapes in the dirt with a stick—monsters and ghouls with drooling fangs and huge claws. And finally, an effigy—although the only one she’d ever seen was Guy Fawkes, burnt on the village common in November, so she drew something like that, on a stake, with flames coming out of it, and then she waited.

  And waited.

  A couple of men left the tavern, staggering slightly, and went off in the opposite direction from Ivy Cottage. Tiffany really wished she’d got Morris to bring her up some food. She was cold out here, and being hungry only made it worse. And, she realised, while she had the earring pointing her towards the tavern, she had no idea what this Mr Cotton looked like.

  Oh dear, had all this been terribly foolish?

  She was about to turn for home when the door opened, and the earring in her hand pulsed hotly. A figure, silhouetted in the dark, portly and stumbling.

  ‘Go home and sober up, Jeb Cotton,’ called a voice from within.

  He shouted something back into the tavern that Tiffany was sure would make even Nora blush, and belched loudly.

  Tiffany squared her shoulders, and reached down to pick up the drawn piece of string from the ground. She wrapped it around her hand and yanked, and the pots and pans she’d drawn jangled noisily.

  ‘What the bloody hell?’ slurred Jeb Cotton.

  She jangled them again, and then gestured to the ghouls and monsters. They rose from the dirt, not alive but flickering and pulsing in the rain. They were eerie, and even though Tiffany knew they weren’t real and would disappear in an hour or two, they still made her shiver.

  Now came a bit of a gamble. ‘Monsters I have drawn, make to wail and groan,’ she whispered, and a dreadful moaning wail rose from them.

  ‘What? Who’s there?’ shouted Jeb Cotton. Behind him, people were starting to come to the tavern door. They stood around, looking confused.

  ‘Jeb Cotton!’ Tiffany shouted, trying to deepen her voice.

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘Wife beater!’

  ‘I bloody never,’ he protested, and stumbled in the road.

  ‘You bloody do, Jeb Cotton,’ said one of the men standing in the tavern doorway.

  ‘Drunkard!’

  ‘That one’s right enough,’ laughed another man.

  ‘You neglect your wife and home! You spend all your coin on gin! Your wife starves while you grow fat!’

  There was a general muttering of assent among the other men. Jeb stumbled closer, and Tiffany held her nerve.

  ‘Who are you?’ he shouted. ‘This is all lies! Lies!’

  ‘Do not come any closer,’ Tiffany warned, panicking a little and waving a glamour over her face to make herself unnoticeable. She yanked on the string again, and the pots jangled.

  ‘Yeah? Or what? You’re a girl,’ he sneered, ‘and I know what to do with girls⁠—’

  She gestured the effigy into life, and up it blazed, sudden and blinding in the wet, dark night.

  Jeb swore and stumbled backwards, losing his footing and sprawling in the mud.

  The crowd at the tavern door had spilled out by now, and among the gasps and cries of fear, Tiffany heard someone say incredulously, ‘It’s the rough music. It’s a skimmington ride.’

  ‘This is the roughest of rough music, Jeb Cotton,’ Tiffany intoned. ‘It is a warning. You will cease your ill treatment of your wife. You will cease drinking. You will work hard and care for your family.’

  ‘I will, I will!’ gibbered Cotton.

  ‘You never have before,’ said one of the men from the tavern. They were beginning to move closer now.

  ‘Aye, we’ve all told you!’

  ‘That good woman will end up in the poor house because of you,’ said another.

  ‘And poor Henry run out of town to be shot at by the French!’

  They had begun to pick up her pots and pans now, and Tiffany shrank further back into the shadows as the men began banging them together, making a rough music of their own. The flickering light from the effigy made the puddles dance.

  ‘This is witchcraft!’ Jeb spluttered, gazing up at the misshapen effigy and the wailing shadows.

  ‘No, this is justice,’ said one of the men.

 

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